Posted on 05/31/2002 11:10:54 PM PDT by TheMole
On September 28, 2000, the European Council, "acting in accordance with the procedure referred to in Article 251 Establishing the European Community," adopted "Common Position (EC) No. 50/2000. "According to Notice No. 2000/C 370/01 of the Official Journal of the European Communities, the Common Position concerned "special provisions for vehicles used for the carriage of passengers comprising more than eight seats in addition to the driver's seat."
In other words, the council - the key decision-making organ of the European Union - passed the so-called bus directive.
For anyone seriously interested in understanding how the EU functions, leafing through the bus directive is a useful exercise. (It can be found online at http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/en/archive/ 2000/c 37020001222en.html.) Inter alia, the directive mandates that "if a manually operated service door is fitted with a slam lock it shall be of the two-stage type"; that "the exits shall be placed in such a way that their number on each side of the two sides of the vehicle is substantially the same"; and that there must be an area of "300 mm in front of all seats other than folding seats, except where a sideways-facing seat is situated above a wheel arch, in which case this dimension may be reduced to 225 mm."
And that is not all. The bus directive runs to 170 pages, even as it leaves out the issue of the "ergonomic configuration of controls and commands" to be dealt with, according to the bus directive's authors, in some future regulation.
IN THE TIME I spent covering the European Union from Brussels, I came across many such items of legislation, most memorably the sheaf of papers governing low-frequency harmonic emissions and an environmental directive on the "stream of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment," known also as the "stream of WEEE." But these were no jokes. A report by the European Commission's environment directorate estimated the cost to taxpayers of its little-noticed WEEE directive at 600 million euros, not including a 3 percent rise in consumer prices for TVs, radios, computers and the like. As for the harmonics directive - ostensibly designed to offset the conjectural risk of disruptions to the power supply by things like hair dryers - it imposed a projected compliance cost on manufacturers of more than 10 billion euros.
Nor was this the whole story. The directive on WEEE was the subject of a complex turf war between the environment directorate, headed by Sweden's Margot Wallstroem, and the enterprise directorate, headed by Finland's Erkki Liikanen. The upshot would affect not only the way in which the law was applied, but the bureaucratic perquisites that would go with its enforcement.
Still more remarkable were the politics behind the bus and harmonics directives. The EU's bus specifications bore uncanny resemblance to those of buses already in production in Europe, but not to those of potential overseas competitors. Harmonics specifications were also tailored closely to European needs, and especially the needs of Electricite de France and Italy's ENEL. Together, they had maneuvered an obscure standard-setting body called CENELEC to shift the burden of compliance costs to electronic-equipment makers before they realized that they'd been had.
Most important, however, was that by leaving the drafting of the harmonics standards to CENELEC - officially a nongovernmental body whose standards are "voluntary" - the EU avoided the charge that it had imposed legally actionable "technical barriers to trade." Thus the EU could protect its markets, and especially such favored players as Electricite de France, all the while enjoying access to overseas markets through its membership in the World Trade Organization.
That, in a nutshell, is how the EU "works." True, such bureaucratic gamesmanship is not unique to Europe, and the reams of technical specifications cited above have their parallels in the regulatory codes of every Western country. The difference is that with the European Union, bureaucrats and bureaucracy are not a byproduct of governance. They are governance. And regulatory overkill is not the unintended consequence of well-intentioned laws. It is the purposeful and necessary mechanism geared to achieve a longstanding design.
FOR THE PAST 50 years, the European Union in its various successive forms has accreted power by operating through stealth and obfuscation. This is no accident. Jean Monnet, a cognac merchant and the EU's godfather, did not believe that the Europe he sought to fashion could be achieved through democratic means. What he created instead was a kind of deus ex machina, which would operate as far from the ballot box as possible, preferably by means of arcane technocratic intrusion.
Thus came about the European Coal and Steel Community, which would in turn become the European Economic Community, then the European Community, and finally, in 1992, the European Union. Yet the long-term purposes of the enterprise were clear enough from the start. As early as 1952, German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer could be heard insisting that "the political meaning" of the ECSC was "infinitely larger than its economic purpose." Half a century later, the introduction of the euro was hailed throughout the Continent less for its economic benefits (inarguable, in my view), than for its political possibilities.
Politically, the ultimate possibility is a United States of Europe. But part-and-parcel with that is the elimination of national identities - thought by the founders of modern Europe to be the source of the Continent's past woes - in favor of a "European" one. Today in Brussels, one routinely meets the kind of people the founders had in mind: well-educated, cosmopolitan and polyglot functionaries, avatars of the new Europe. They are the products of the best European schools; they have passed rigorous qualification exams; their thoughts are enlightened; their tendencies are progressive. On an individual basis, I have nowhere encountered such impressive people. They are the good Europeans.
Things look different, however, when these people are seen as a group. Despite the great diversity of background, there is also a remarkable sameness of opinion. Almost uniformly, today's good Europeans believe that the death penalty is wrong, that the Kyoto Protocol on climate change must be ratified (whatever the cost), that legal conventions, not military action, are the only road to peace, and that standards in health care, tax policy, manufacture, weights and measurements, even the production of foodstuffs like mayonnaise and Pecorino cheese, need to be applied identically throughout the EU. Then too, there is an understated conceit that European methods offer a more sophisticated response to the challenges of modernity than the cowboy capitalism practiced by their American friends.
Put another way, this is the thinking of a cadre. Once a mark of genuine open-mindedness, to be a good European today has become its own form of political correctness, in which contrary views may not decently be held. Thus, for the British to oppose adoption of the euro makes them "little Englanders"; to be in favor of the death penalty (the majority position in several European countries) is to be "against human rights"; and to vote for an anti-immigration candidate like the late Pim Fortuyn is to be a reactionary, and perhaps even a racist.
Then too, the good Europeans of the EU seem routinely engaged in projects that are either useless (see above) or wasteful, when not downright corrupt. They employ a language both impenetrable and stupid - consider such gems as the "quasi-abolition of central ex-ante visa controls." They operate with complete immunity from popular views: European legislation is initiated solely by the Commission, an unelected body, and it is ratified by the Council, which holds its deliberations in secret. (The European Parliament, the only popularly elected body, remains a toothless organ.)
Yet by almost every measure, the good Europeans are botching the job. Outside of Ireland and Britain, real unemployment runs at more than twice the US rate. The vaunted European social safety net is slouching toward insolvency. Crime rates, particularly in Britain and France, have skyrocketed. Most seriously, perhaps, the failure of the EU or its member states to devise a sensible immigration policy has created the worst of both worlds: massive (and often cruel) illegal immigration without any mechanisms for absorption and assimilation.
ALL THIS HAS prompted a reaction. In October 1999, Austrians gave 27 percent of their vote to Joerg Haider's Freedom Party, whose platform mixed anti-immigrant xenophobia with pro-market liberalism. Such was the shock that for four months it immobilized the government. Then-prime minister Viktor Klima refused to form a government with his usual partner, the center-Right People's Party of Wolfgang Schuessel. But much less would Klima consent to join forces with a group roundly accused of harboring neo-Nazi tendencies.
The matter was eventually resolved in February 2000, when Schuessel reluctantly joined in coalition with the Freedom Party. He could hardly have done otherwise. The failure to form a government would have soon forced the country to go to new elections, which would likely have further strengthened Haider's hand. But for this act of leadership, Schuessel was all but excommunicated by his European peers, his diplomats formally ostracized within the EU.
The reasons for Haider's rise are several, but chiefly they had to do with the collusive Left-Right coalitions that had governed Austria for decades, effectively shutting out any genuine political alternatives. And as with France's Jean-Marie Le Pen, the Freedom Party vote was a form of protest politics. Even so, the party won its votes fairly.
But the good Europeans at the EU were not amused. And this was not simply on account of Haider's extreme distastefulness. When Silvio Berlusconi was overwhelmingly elected prime minister of Italy last May, the EU reacted in identical fashion. Berlusconi was the gauche upstart, the billionaire anti-establishmentarian with a shady business past and pro-American views. He was not "one of us," the cozy political establishment of Socialists and Christian Democrats that has ruled Europe and dominated Brussels for decades. He was a bad European, who didn't cotton instantly to the cliches of Brussels policy makers or go along with the European line for comity's sake. He is, one might say, a bus of the wrong measure.
TODAY, EUROPE finds itself in a slow downward spiral. Economically, the Continent has been sclerotic for over a decade, with every burst of good news followed by a drizzle of bad. An enlargement that ought to have taken place years ago is every year postponed. Europe's brightest academics, doctors and businessmen routinely decamp for greener pastures in the US. The adoption of the euro has been a bright spot, but bad fiscal policy means continued capital flight. In its foreign outlook, the EU has adopted a policy of posture, steadily drifting away from the US and allowing NATO slowly to sink into irrelevance. The rise in anti-Semitic incidents in Europe is largely a Middle Eastern import, but it has been abetted by a policy of appeasement to Arab states at Israel's expense and a cravenness to immigrant Muslim populations, who are allowed to run riot in European cities without fear of the law.
Perhaps worst of all, the EU has gone from being a small but effective engine of economic liberalization to a mammoth but incompetent vehicle for every fashionable social, economic and political nostrum. The result is the growing backlash of the bad European, from Le Pen on the right to the antiglobalization movement on the left.
At some point, probably not far off, these problems will compound into catastrophe. Where will the good Europeans be then? Hopefully not writing the book on toilet-seat plasticity.
Europe is rapidly self-destructing.
And it makes about as much senses.
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